Finding Home By Laura J. Oliver

One summer afternoon, before I’d entered first grade, I climbed a rickety metal stool near the kitchen sink and discovered a lemon meringue pie resting on the Formica counter. With my mother tapping away on her typewriter in another part of the house, I touched a tentative finger to one wavy peak. It gave way like sea foam— soft and without substance —a sweetness that dissolved on my tongue.

In my effort to disguise my crime, more and more meringue disappeared until the puffy white cloud had disappeared, and the lemon filling shone like a yellow sun. To evade punishment, I blamed the cat, whom I feared —a Siamese ankle-biter who would not let me love her.

My father’s response required creativity, and my mother allowed it. I’d lied, and exposure of my character was deemed a just consequence. He explained it like this: for the entire month of June, he’d report to everyone what I’d done. As I stood beside him, gripped by one hand, Mrs. Uebersax next door, our mailman, and the clerk at the local package goods store all had to hear what kind of person I was. A little fibber, it turns out, who will eat the meringue off your pie.

As intended, it was humiliating but in an intriguing kind of way. Those who listened looked down at me politely at first, then their expressions became inexplicably compassionate and a little worried. I didn’t know then that my days with my father were numbered. That within five years, he would have another family, and we would rarely see each other.

Fast forward 30 years, and I am a young mother, receiving the news my dad has had both a heart attack and a stroke at the wheel of his car near Pocomoke. He is assessed in the emergency room, treated, and transferred to Intensive Care in a Baltimore hospital. I have not seen him many times in my adult life, but I know I should visit.

I have no sense of direction, and this handicap adds to the stress. Possessing no inner compass, no guidance system, I’m often lost; my instinct for which way to turn is invariably exquisitely wrong. So, finding my way into the city is a stressful ordeal, and on my way to Intensive Care, I turn down the wrong hall. It’s like driving around a bend on a dark road and coming upon the scene of an accident. From a curtained alcove, someone is wailing like an animal in pain. The source of the noise is not the person who is injured or sick but the loved one in attendance. There are footsteps, as if that person is pacing. I am transfixed.

Most of the anguish is pure sound, but as I listen, arrested, words form. I hear a mournful “Nooooooo” and then a chillingly adult voice wailing, “I want my mommy back.” I am horrified to be inadvertently present at such a personal moment, and yet, it is hard to move away. No one knows how someone else suffers, what raw grief sounds like. When that kind of pain comes for me, will mine sound the same?

I hurry back down the hall praying that the grief-stricken relative will be comforted. I imagine my prayer rising like heat from hot asphalt, with hundreds of others, every day, up through the ceiling, then through the roof of this hospital, and I hope that somehow compassion serves a purpose. I would describe what I’m doing as evoking an energy, and I’d use the term “universe.” All my adult life, I’ve tried to replace God the Good Father with something more likely.

In the sitting area near my dad’s unit, I wait until I can see him. Fifteen minutes every hour is the rule. I leaf through a magazine, not really reading the stories until a photograph abruptly catches my eye. A small boat is pictured on a black-and-white river, a river indistinguishable from the one of my youth. With my next breath, I’m not in ICU, hoping not to be fatherless. I’m a child in the presence of the father I want only to please.

He sits beside me in the stern of a drifting rowboat, a brown-haired, blue-eyed man in his thirties. It is dusk, and we have been exploring secret creeks and hidden coves. Honeysuckle and seaweed scent the air. As the dying light coalesces around the red-embered sun, he restarts the engine and turns us towards home. The stern plows deep as the boat accelerates, then planes and levels off, the cove ringed by shore lights that candle the horizon. They flicker and flame– house lights and porch lamps. They could be fallen stars carried like flotsam to shore.

I can’t hear my father speak unless I turn my head sideways. The rush of air whips his words into the night. I’m unprepared, therefore, when he puts my hand on the tiller, scooting over on the seat to let me steer. Stunned to be guiding the boat by myself, I see the entrance to our cove and, in the distance, our pier. I keep the bow aimed precisely, my whole being locked on our landmark as if we might fly off the edge of the world should I fail.

He nods at the channel markers, where their lights rock in the current. “Keep green to starboard heading out, but red on your right going in.” I squeeze my eyes shut to memorize these instructions, then overcorrect the tiller and the boat swings wide. I look up at him, panicked, but he corrects our course with a smile. “Remember this,” he calmly instructs the girl he is leaving, the one who still struggles to find her way.

He leans down so I’ll hear him.

“‘Green to starboard’ will take you anywhere you want to go on the river. ‘Red, right, returning’ will always be all you need to get home.”

Happy Father’s Day.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.